Utah mom leaves ‘rude and ungovernable’ boy, 8, at hospital

Published 3:02 pm, Thursday, March 10, 2016

WEST JORDAN, Utah >> A Utah mother has been charged with child abuse and abandonment after prosecutors say she left her 8-year-old son at a hospital.

The boy walked into the West Jordan hospital on Feb. 21 and gave employees a note from his mother saying she did not want him, according to police.

The note named the boy and said he was “rude and ungovernable! I do not want him in my house at all!” It went on to describe the boy’s flaws, according to charging documents.

The boy also told hospital staff and police that his mother hit him with a spoon, prosecutors said. He was taken into state Child and Family Services custody.

The mother told KSL-TV that she thought state laws allowed her to leave the boy at the hospital.

“I thought that it was OK that we could drop them off and it was a Safe Haven place,” she told the TV station. “I really did not know any other way to go about it.”

The mother didn’t deny the allegations and told KSL-TV that she wrote in the note that the child needed more help than she could provide for him. She said she has four special needs children and believed authorities would understand that she was overwhelmed.

Safe Haven laws allow new parents to leave their children at hospitals, no questions asked. But it only applies to infants who are 1 to 3 days old, according to Ashley Sumner, spokeswoman for the Division of Child and Family Services.

There are crisis centers that allow parents to drop off young children for 24 hours if they feel overwhelmed, but there are rules governing the practice, said Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill.

“You don’t get to arbitrarily drop children off at certain institutions,” he said. “You reach out to that organization, that organization helps process your child, there’s an understanding. ... You don’t simply say, ‘I’ve had enough and I’m going to drop off this child and no one knows who I am.’”